OPINION:Femi Fani-Kayode And His Wasted Cambridge Education

Femi Fani-Kayode has had an extensive career in public nuisance. He has been a nagging community irritant for so long that a certain segment of the Nigerian political cognoscenti, in their generosity of spirit, chose to adopt a muted explanation for his obsessive rabidity.

There must be a reason why Fani-Kayode has proved such a neurotic brand of a Cambridge product. There must be a reason why he is permanently in lunatic rage. There must be a reason why, at any point in time, he would be found, churning a whirlwind of noise around a straw.

Might it be that he is habituated to sniffing a white, mind-altering powder?

That proposition emerged from a consensus acceptance that the man faithfully displays the capricious behavioral pattern of a voracious substance abuser. His convulsive agitations rise and fall on the crests of depression and exhilaration. And he tends to signal that he is too vexed by his mess that he can’t stanch the overflow!

This magnanimous view of a Fani-Kayode in need has served to make the otherwise torturous experience of abiding his disturbance somewhat bearable. He is forgiven in advance of his over-the-top blunders. He is pitied as a man in need of rehabilitation. And sometimes, he is dismissed as a man who needs sympathy more than the backlash of collective responsorial anger he deserves.

But Fani-Kayode has mistaken this communal grant of grace as a license to practice gladiatorial madness. He conceives of the nation’s tolerance for his gross misconduct as our approval of his ways. He believes the lie that he is unquestionable. He can disseminate hate and remain free. He can propagate xenophobia and be condoned.

All that false sense of inviolability is showing cracks.

And I didn’t cast the first stone at his brittle myth. The person who flung the first stone is someone Fani-Kayode can’t conveniently label ‘beggarly’, ‘penman’, ‘a voyeur of extra-ordinary intensity’ or an ‘obscure element on the payroll of Buhari and Tinubu‘.

Fani-Kayode is a paranoid blustering coward. His siege mentality convinces him that every challenge to his unruliness is inspired and sponsored by his perceived political enemies. He is wrong. His delinquent braggadocio offends all humans with the most sense of decency.

The citizen who pioneered the ongoing demystification of the anti-hero of impunity is not a politico. He is not known for writing his political opinion. He is known for rapping.

Jude Abaga is naturally reticent man. He has his celebrity status under his own control. But he had to let Fani-Kayode have it. MI couldn’t restrain himself from doing it. The rapper had had enough of Fani-Kayode’s unpatriotic theatrics.

Fani-Kayode had preyed on the kidnap of Olu Falae. Fani-Kayode issued a press statement that explicitly threatened the Federal Government of Nigeria. The presidency must produce Falae or reap a crisis.

MI, like the rest of the sane in Nigeria, was outraged. The rapper addressed a pointblank rebuke to the impudent loudmouth: “YOU MR FFK ARE A JOKER!”

MI had intuited that Fani-Kayode, 55, might be, as is normal for his age, in the midst of a midlife crisis. MI had figured that Fani-Kayode may have been deluded by an exaggerated feeling of significance. Fani-Kayode may have thought he was big enough to levy a threat on the Government and the People of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

MI advanced him a reality check!

The rapper, a product of the Nigerian school system, even volunteered the Cambridge certificated Fani-Kayode an online tuition-free lesson in decorum. Keeping it civil and polite, MI taught Fani-Kayode who is supposed to a lawyer that a citizen may make demands on the government, but is not permitted to threaten state authority.

MI sent the tweets in the hope that Fani-Kayode would learn. It turns out that Fani-Kayode is uneducable. Fani-Kayode can’t be tamed. Fani-Kayode can’t be reined. Fani-Kayode is an embodied anarchy trying to detonate!

Fani-Kayode is, in today’s Nigeria, the number one go-to source for the most provocative, sensationalist buffoonery. And of course, his staple of stupid remarks can have comical utility. But he is not a model you can point to your impressionable child.Fani-Kayode is bankrupt of decency and discretion. He desecrates propriety. He has a wild tongue. He is enslaved to his stream of consciousness.A normal person, a grown up with a mind that is capable of sieves thoughts as they come, would not dare advertise his penile travelogue. He would not gladly publish and give immortality to the register of the names of all the women he has bedded. But this is a strange individual who embarrasses you by how much he embarrasses himself.Fani-Kayode is the man you want to lend some shame! He is the man whose most urgent need is a sense of shame.

This is the mocker who had instructed that then incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan to resign and debase himself to appease an aggrieved Ota tin-god. Fani-Kayode proposed, as part of the rites of penance, that President Jonathan prostrate and weep a River Niger of tears. He stopped short of advising Jonathan to strip himself naked as a token of profound contrition!Fani-Kayode would later buddy up to the same Jonathan and lick the sole of Jonathan’s shoes!

Fani-Kayode is the man who cannot sidestep his malice to participate in the mourning that our civilization and our shared humanity prescribe in a tragedy. He won’t comfort the bereaved families. He would send a shout-out to the suicide bombers. He would urge the death couriers to deliver more carnage.And Fani-Kayode would proceed to tell you -without blushing- that he wants more deaths because he is mad at you for electing the Fulani man he hates President!

Fani-Kayode is the man who wants to impose ethnic apartheid on Nigeria. He wants Nigerians to live in circumscribed clusters of their tribes. In a world that has shrunk to a global village, he wants Nigerians to disperse to racially segregated tents! Fani-Kayode is the man would cast a null vote for the second secession of Biafra. The Fulani-Yoruba man will not live in the fantasy country and naturalize as Biafran. But he supports any course of action that would open another flank of violence in Nigeria.Let there be chaos, because he hates Buhari!

The Chairman of the National Human Rights Commission of Nigeria, Professor Chidi Odinkalu, had admonished Fani-Kayode for exploiting the criminal incident of Olu Falae’s abduction as a rationale for spreading hate. Odinkalu said, “Chief Falae’s abduction is a crime but to make that the basis of a campaign against a race as Femi-Fani Kayode did is hate speech. It is hate speech to leave individual responsibility and describe a race as tsetse fly, locust and leeches.”Fani-Kayode, yesteryear’s “proudly one-eighth Fulani-blooded man”, fired back a retort. He was only being candid. He had simply called ‘a spade, a spade.’Fani-Kayode never defers to restraint. He would never submit himself to a moment of moderation. The rhetorical fundamentalist would feel compromised if he reserved some hate. He won’t hoard his dark thoughts: He would tweet them, essay them, and voice them!I find it instructive that while trying to deflect the issues I had raised about his penchant for unruliness, Fani-Kayode called my modest Nigerian education ‘a waste’. That’s laughable! The interlocutor Fani-Kayode is striving to swat back is the same chap whose education Fani-Kayode imagines is languishing in a dump.

The incredible point is that he engaged finger-pointing. That’s a game that guarantees the initiator a multiplied retributive downside. As a rule, a perfect rule that suffers no exception,the giver winds up more blessed than the target. And it is obvious, that in this tiny matter of wasted education, more digits point back at Fani-Kayode, the accuser.

Fani-Kayode flaunts a Cambridge degree that literally accuses him of parading a stolen property!Fani-Kayode doesn’t strike you as a man who attended Cambridge. He strikes you as a man who toured Cambridge. A man who went sight-seeing at Cambridge and returned with a been-there paper souvenir!Fani-Kayode is a vulgarian. He is a passenger on the auto-pilot of base animal instinct. He knows no courtesy. He knows no manners. He knows no dignity. He insults. He abuses. He curses. He is a narcissistic antisocial thug, with an insatiable appetite for ostentatious pageantry.Fani-Kayode visits violence on all that sound education represents!

He is the man who had a failed baptism in the waters of Cambridge. He stayed immersed in Cambridge for years, but came out dry. He would not be tempered by the culture of one of the most distinguished centers of learning in the world.Fani-Kayode’s years in national limelight have not produced one tangible positive for Nigeria. His recipe for continual relevance is daily assaulting the psyche of Nigerians with his crackpot utterances.

At the moment, he is trying to parley his Cambridge souvenir and the faded British accent that clings to his tongue into a start-up capital for hate entrepreneurship!

EMMANUEL UGWU